article

Free access

Customizing information capture and access

Authors:

Devika SubramanianAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), Volume 15, Issue 1

Pages 67 - 101

https://doi.org/10.1145/239041.239048

Published: 01 January 1997 Publication History

Abstract

This article presents a customizable architecture for software agents that capture and access information in large, heterogeneous, distributed electronic repositories. The key idea is to exploit underlying structure at various levels of granularity to build high-level indices with task-specific interpretations. Information agents construct such indices and are configured as a network of reusable modules called structure detectors and segmenters. We illustrate our architecture with the design and implementation of smart information filters in two contexts: retrieving stock market data from Internet newsgroups and retrieving technical reports from Internet FTP sites.

References

[1]

ALLAN, J. AND SALTON, G. 1993. The identification of text relations using automatic hypertext linking. In the Workshop on Intelligent Hypertext, The ACM Conference on Information Knowledge Management. ACM, New York.]]

[2]

BALCAZAR, J. L., DfAZ, J., AND GABARRO, J. 1988. Structural Complexity. EATCS Monograph on Theoretical Computer Science, vol. 1. Springer-Verlag, Berlin.]]

Digital Library

[3]

BELKIN, N. AND CROFT, W. 1992. Information filtering and information retrieval: Two sides of the same coin. Commun. ACM 35, 12 (Dec.), 29-38.]]

Digital Library

[4]

BLUM, M. AND KOZEN, D. 1978. On the power of the compass (or, why mazes are easier to search than graphs). In Proceedings of the Symposium on the Foundations of Computer Science. IEEE, New York, 132-142.]]

Digital Library

[5]

BROOKS, R. 1986. A robust layered control system for a mobile robot. IEEE J. Robot. Automat. RA-2 (Apr.).]]

[6]

BROOKS, R. 1990. Elephants don't play chess. In Design of Autonomous Agents, P. Maes, Ed. MIT/Elsevier, Cambridge, Mass.]]

[7]

CANNY, J. AND GOLDBERG, K. 1993. A "RISC" paradigm for industrial robotics. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation. IEEE, New York.]]

[8]

CATE, V. 1992. Alex: A global file system. In Proceedings of the Usenix Conference on File Systems. USENIX Assoc., Berkeley, Calif.]]

[9]

COHEN, J., Ed. 1993. Commun. ACM 36, 4 (Apr.).]]

Digital Library

[10]

CREAN, P., RUSSELL, C., AND DELLON, M.V. 1991. Overview and programming guide to the Mind image management systems. Tech. Rep. X9000627, Xerox, Inc., Palo Alto, Calif.]]

[11]

DAVIS, J. AND LAGOZE, C. 1995. Dienst--An architecture for distributed document libraries. Commun. ACM 38, 4 (Apr.), 47.]]

Digital Library

[12]

DONALD, B. 1995. Information invariants in robotics. Artif. Intell. 72, 217-304.]]

Digital Library

[13]

DONALD, B., JENNINGS, J., AND RUS, D. 1993. Information invariants for cooperating autonomous mobile robots. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Robotics Research. Carnegie-Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, Pa.]]

[14]

DONALD, B., JENNINGS, g., AND RUS, D. 1995. Minimalism + distribution = supermodularity. J. Exper. Theoret. Artif. Intell. To be published.]]

[15]

ETZIONI, O. AND WELD, D. 1994. A softbot-based interface to the Internet. Commun. ACM 37, 7 (July), 72-76.]]

Digital Library

[16]

FUJISAWA, H., NAKANO, Y., AND KURINO, K. 1992. Segmentation methods for character recognition: From segmentation to document structure analysis. Proc. IEEE 80, 7.]]

[17]

GENESERETH, M. AND KETCHPEL, S. 1994. Software agents. Commun. ACM 37, 7 (July), 48-53.]]

Digital Library

[18]

GRAY, R. 1995. Transportable agents. Tech. Rep. PCS-TR95-261, Dept. of Computer Science, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H.]]

[19]

GRAY, R. 1996. Agent Tcl: A flexible and secure mobile agent system. In Proceedings of the 4th Annual Tcl / Tk Workshop. ACM, New York.]]

Digital Library

[20]

HEARST, M. AND FLAUNT, C. 1993. Subtopic structuring for full-length document access. In Proceedings of the 16th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. ACM, New York, 59-68.]]

Digital Library

[21]

HOPCROFT, J. AND ULLMAN, J. 1979. Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass.]]

Digital Library

[22]

HUTTENLOCHER, D., KLANDERMAN, G., AND RUCKLIDGE, W. 1993. Comparing images using the Hausdorff distance. IEEE Trans. Patt. Anal. Machine Intell. 15, 9, 850-863.]]

Digital Library

[23]

HUTTENLOCHER, D., NOH, J., AND RUCKLIDGE, W. 1992. Tracking non-rigid objects in complex scenes. Tech. Rep. TR92-1320, Cornell Univ., Ithaca, N.Y.]]

[24]

JAIN, A. AND BHATTCHARJEE, S. 1992. Address block location on envelopes using Gabor filters. Patt. Recog. 25, 12.]]

[25]

KAHLE, B. 1991. Overview of wide area information servers. WAIS Online Doc. Online 15 (Sept. 5), 56-60.]]

Digital Library

[26]

KAHN, R. AND CERF, V. 1988. The world ofknowbots. Report to the Corporation for National Research Initiative, Arlington, Va.]]

[27]

KAUTZ, H., SELMAN, B., AND COEN, M. 1994. Bottom-up design of software agents. Commun. ACM 37, 7 (July), 143-145.]]

Digital Library

[28]

KUCERA, H. AND FRANCIS, W. 1967. Computational Analysis of Present Day American English. Brown University Press, Providence, R.I.]]

[29]

LESK, M. 1991. The CORE electronic library. In Proceedings of SIGIR. ACM, New York.]]

Digital Library

[30]

MAES, P. 1994. Agents that reduce work and information overload. Commun. ACM 37, 7 (July), 31-40.]]

Digital Library

[31]

MITCHELL, T., CARUANA, R., FREITAG, D., MCDERMOTT, J., AND ZABOWSKI, D. 1994. Experience with a learning personal assistant. Commun. ACM 37, 7 (July), 81-91.]]

Digital Library

[32]

MIZUNO, M., TsuJI, Y., TANAKA, T., TANAKA, H., ISASHITA, M., AND TEMMA, T. 1991. Document recognition system with layout structure generator. NEC Res. Devel. 32, 3.]]

[33]

MUNKRES, J. 1975. Topology: A First Course. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.]]

[34]

NAGY, G., SETH, S., AND VISHWANATHAN, M. 1992. A prototype document image analysis system for technical journals. Computer 25, 7.]]

Digital Library

[35]

PEARCE, C. AND NICHOLAS, C. 1993. Generating a dynamic hypertext environment with n-gram analysis. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Information Knowledge ManagemeAt. ACM, New York, 148-153.]]

Digital Library

[36]

ROBERTSON, S. 1981. The methodology of information retrieval experiment. In Information Retrieval Experiment, K. Sparck Jones, Ed. Butterworths, Durban, S. Africa, 9-31.]]

[37]

ROBERTSON, G., CARD, S., AND MACKINLAY, J. 1993. Information visualization using 3D interactive animation. Commun. ACM 36, 4 (Apr.), 57-70.]]

Digital Library

[38]

Rus, D. AND SUBRAMANIAN, D. 1993. Multi-media RISSC informatics: Retrieving information with simple structural components. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. ACM, New York.]]

Digital Library

[39]

Rus, D. AND SUMMERS, K. 1995. Using whitespace for automated document structuring. In Advances in Digital Libraries, N. Adam, B. Bhargava, and Y. Yesha, Eds. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 916. Springer-Verlag, New York.]]

[40]

Rus, D., GRAY, R., AND KOTZ, D. 1997. Transportable information agents. In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Autonomous Agents. ACM, New York. To be published.]]

Digital Library

[41]

SALTON, G. 1989. Automatic Text Processing: The Transformation, Analysis, and Retrieval of Information by Computer. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass.]]

Digital Library

[42]

SALTON, G. AND BUCKLEY, C. 1990. Improving retrieval performance by relevance feedback. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. 41, 4, 288-297.]]

[43]

SALTON, G. AND MCGILL, M. 1983. Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval. McGraw- Hill, New York.]]

Digital Library

[44]

SANKOFF, D. AND KRUSKAL, J. 1983. Time Warps, String Edits, and Macromolecules: The Theory of Practice of Sequence Comparison. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass.]]

[45]

SCHWARTZ, M. AND TSIRIGOTIS, P. 1991. Experience with a semantically cognizant Internet white pages directory tool. J. Internetworking Res. Exper. (Mar.).]]

[46]

SCHWARTZ, M., EMTAGE, A., KAHLE, B., AND NEUMAN, B. 1992. A comparison of Internet discovery approaches. Comput. Syst. 5, 4.]]

[47]

STATISTICAL SCIENCES. 1991. Splus Reference Manual. Statistical Sciences, Inc., Seattle, Wash.]]

[48]

TSUJIMOTO, S. AND ASADA, H. 1992. Major components of a complete text reading system. Proc. IEEE 80, 7.]]

[49]

WANG, D. AND SRIHARI, S. 1989. Classification of newspaper image blocks using texture analysis. Comput. Vis. Graph. Image Process. 47.]]

Digital Library

[50]

TONG, K., CASEY, R., AND WAHL, F. 1982. Document analysis system. IBM J. Res. Devel. 26, 6.]]

Cited By

Yang JXiong Z(2020)Analysis and research of news gathering and editing process based on data Mining2020 2nd International Conference on Applied Machine Learning (ICAML)10.1109/ICAML51583.2020.00053(220-223)Online publication date: Oct-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICAML51583.2020.00053
Tsai WChen ABaldoni R(2008)Service oriented architecture for financial customer relationship managementProceedings of the second international conference on Distributed event-based systems10.1145/1385989.1386027(301-304)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1385989.1386027
Embley DHurst MLopresti DNagy G(2006)Table-processing paradigms: a research surveyInternational Journal of Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR)10.1007/s10032-006-0017-x8:2-3(66-86)Online publication date: 9-May-2006
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10032-006-0017-x
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Customizing information capture and access

Recommendations

Agent-based approach for information gathering on highly distributed and heterogeneous environment
ICPADS '96: Proceedings of the 1996 International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems

The core of the problem of Information Gathering is how to generate a concise, high-quality response to the information needs of a user. However, this task is becoming difficult due to the explosion in the amount of electronic information. Agent-based ...
Intelligent Adaptive Information Agents
Special issue: adaptive intelligent agents

Adaptation in open, multi-agent information gathering systems is important for several reasons. These reasons include the inability to accurately predict future problem-solving workloads, future changes in existing information requests, future failures and ...
Agent-based infrastructure and an application to internet information gathering

Pragmatic applications and studies of agent-based software engineering have evolved over the last decade. In order to explore how an agent is organized and applied, in this paper an agent framework is presented and applied to Internet information ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Information Systems

ACM Transactions on Information Systems Volume 15, Issue 1

Jan. 1997

101 pages

ISSN:1046-8188

EISSN:1558-2868

DOI:10.1145/239041

Editor:
Robert B. Allen
Bellcore, Morristown, NJ

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 1997 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 January 1997

Published in TOIS Volume 15, Issue 1

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

23
Total Citations
View Citations
1,077
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)144
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)21

Reflects downloads up to 05 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Yang JXiong Z(2020)Analysis and research of news gathering and editing process based on data Mining2020 2nd International Conference on Applied Machine Learning (ICAML)10.1109/ICAML51583.2020.00053(220-223)Online publication date: Oct-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICAML51583.2020.00053
Tsai WChen ABaldoni R(2008)Service oriented architecture for financial customer relationship managementProceedings of the second international conference on Distributed event-based systems10.1145/1385989.1386027(301-304)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1385989.1386027
Embley DHurst MLopresti DNagy G(2006)Table-processing paradigms: a research surveyInternational Journal of Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR)10.1007/s10032-006-0017-x8:2-3(66-86)Online publication date: 9-May-2006
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10032-006-0017-x
Gao XMurugesan SLo B(2005)Extraction of Keyterms by Simple Text Mining for Business Information RetrievalProceedings of the IEEE International Conference on e-Business Engineering10.1109/ICEBE.2005.66(332-339)Online publication date: 12-Oct-2005
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICEBE.2005.66
Rus DSubramanian D(2005)Information retrieval, information structure, and information agentsIntelligent Hypertext10.1007/BFb0023964(145-182)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2005
https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0023964
Cheng Tung Wan Wang Wan Ling Chan Shung Kwan (2004)Three-tier multi-agent architecture for asset management consultantIEEE International Conference on e-Technology, e-Commerce and e-Service, 2004. EEE '04. 200410.1109/EEE.2004.1287305(173-176)Online publication date: 2004
https://doi.org/10.1109/EEE.2004.1287305
Flesca SGreco GGreco SZumpano E(2003)A lightweight tool for easy Web site navigationProceedings of the 7th International Conference on Properties and Applications of Dielectric Materials (Cat. No.03CH37417)10.1109/WISE.2003.1254477(134-143)Online publication date: 2003
https://doi.org/10.1109/WISE.2003.1254477
Perugini SRamakrishnan N(2003)Personalizing Interactions with Information Systems10.1016/S0065-2458(03)57007-3(323-382)Online publication date: 2003
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2458(03)57007-3
Luo YLiu KDavis D(2002)A multi-agent decision support system for stock tradingIEEE Network: The Magazine of Global Internetworking10.1109/65.98054116:1(20-27)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2002
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/65.980541
Yuan Luo Davis DKecheng Liu (2001)Information and knowledge exchange in a multi-agent system for stock trading2001 Enterprise Networking, Applications and Services Conference Proceedings.. EntNet@SUPERCOMM2001 (Cat. No.01EX543)10.1109/ENTNET.2001.981989(47-55)Online publication date: 2001
https://doi.org/10.1109/ENTNET.2001.981989
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Article

Figures

Tables

Media

View Issue’s Table of Contents